Finalists 2018

SME

Sunna Design

Sunna Design conceives, manufactures and retails smart solar street lighting particularly adapted to emerging-market environments. Its lamps use a nickel-metal hydride (NiMH) battery chemistry that is resilient to low and high temperatures and has a 10-year lifetime, making it well-suited to remote places with extreme climates. The company has installed about 10,000 lamps in 40 countries working with local partners. Its products are widespread across Africa, parts of the Middle East and India.

BBOXX Ltd

BBOXX is a next generation utility company, bringing an on-grid experience to an off-grid setting – powering growth and transforming the lives of those living in rural communities in the developing world. BBOXX believes in an opportunity to leapfrog traditional grid infrastructure straight to smarter solutions through decentralized solar.

1366 Technologies

1366 Technologies has developed a new process for making highly efficient silicon wafers, which typically account for almost 40% of the cost of a solar module. The process cuts the cost of wafer manufacturing by more than 50% and reduces the energy required by more than 60% when compared to traditional silicon ingot sawing techniques that are now used in about 90% of wafer production. The wafers are very similar to traditional wafer cells and can be used in more than 80% of solar manufacturing facilities worldwide without the need to install new equipment. In the past year, 1366 has made significant improvements to its cell efficiency and has delivered on its first commercial installation – a 500KW installation in Japan.

Non-Profit Organization (NPO/NGO)

SELCO Foundation

The philosophy of SELCO Foundation is that decentralized renewable energy solutions need to be implemented holistically by combining technology, finance and social aspects to demonstrate the link between environmental sustainability and poverty alleviation. Interventions of the organization leads to improved quality of life and increased incomes for the poor: with the underlying aim to create processes that can be replicated around the world for 3 billion poor people.

Solar Sister

Solar Sister is a not-for-profit organization that combines clean energy access and women’s enterprise. It creates sustainable businesses by investing in a network of women entrepreneurs who sell and deliver clean energy to their communities in rural Africa.

We Care Solar

We Care Solar saves lives in childbirth by supplying solar power to remote health centers across Africa and Asia. In developing countries, midwives and doctors struggle to provide obstetric care at night. We Care Solar designs and manufactures a “Solar Suitcase”: a 12 volt DC solar electric system with 40W or 80W solar panels combined with efficient appliances - medical lights, phone chargers, and the option of a fetal heart rate monitor. The Solar Suitcase is portable, durable and has been deployed in 2,400 health facilities serving over 1 million deliveries to date. The organization also conducts training for installation, usage and maintenance so that Solar Suitcases are operated effectively.

Global High Schools

Asia

Mahindra United World College of India

Mahindra United World College of India (MUCWI) is a private coeducational boarding school in the rural Western Ghats region. It is one of 17 United World Colleges around the world and offers two-year International Baccalaureate courses to a small number of feepaying and grant-aided students, many of whom are from overseas.

The project will establish a waste-management scheme at the school and in five surrounding villages. A solar-powered cart will collect waste plastic and take it to a storage depot, where it will be collected by a local firm that will turn it into polyfuel, a kerosene and diesel substitute. This will then be sold at subsidized prices to villagers and the school.

Bahrain Bayan School

The Bahrain Bayan School is a K-12 non-profit bilingual school established in 1982. With the help of the Zayed Future Energy Prize money, the school intends to develop a learning platform called EcoLab 360. The platform is to educate students and the surrounding community on sustainable practices and technologies by focusing on the five R’s; Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Raise awareness, and Renewable energy.

Shenzhen Yadi School

Shenzhen Yadi School is a private boarding school founded in 2003. It has 1,800 students. The school will partner with BYD, a previous ZFEP winner, to implement its project. About 50% of the school’s students are children of BYD employees. The application states that the school has established a New Energy Exploration & Experience Center, through which students become involved in practical activities related to renewable energy.

Muntinlupa National High School

The Muntinlupa National High School serves a large cohort of students who, when grouped with the staff and school-related personnel, number around 10,000. The school currently relies on a diesel generator to provide electricity for the site and intends to introduce a bioreactor project in which algae can be cultivated for use as a biofuel and can be used to purify wastewater. The choice of algae stems from its hardiness to fluctuations in light intensity and algae’s many uses.

Africa

Aouda Saadia High School

The Aouda Saadia School is a girls school, with students from ‘modest families of artisans and farmers’. It plans to add solar water heaters, photovoltaic panels and LED light bulbs to reduce the energy use of the school and provide hot showers. Floor lamps will be installed to light the school at night, so that students are safe and night classes can be held for local women seeking to become literate. The school also plans to develop teaching modules, educational tools and training workshops for students, and to provide air conditioning for classrooms to help students concentrate.

Primrose Technical High School

The Primrose Technical High School has about 900 students and is situated close to two large informal housing settlements. Students from these settlements often do not have access to basic facilities at home. This plan would use solar water heating, solar lighting and LEDs, and a vegetable garden to improve the students quality of life, providing them food and making sure that they have warm showers. The entirety of this plan would cost approximately $85,000, depending on the exchange rate between dollars and South African rand, and includes the cost of employing a gardener and a supervisor for the showers for the first year.

Gaitheri Secondary School

Gaitheri Secondary School is a co-educational secondary school of around 250 students and 20 staff about 40km north of Nairobi.

The school is currently dependent on the local electricity grid which is unreliable and does not support ICT education. The school has outlined a three phase vision to address this and other problems through sustainability. The first phase saw the installation of 2.4kWp of solar panels and served as a proof-of-concept for the use of PV to support ICT classes. However the power generated is insufficient and five students share a single machine.

The Americas

Centro Educativo Mbaracayu

Mbaracayú Educational Centre is a technical boarding school for rural and indigenous girls ages 15-18. It is located in the Mbaracayú Reserve’s forest. This centre opened its doors in 2009 and represents an initiative of the Fundación Paraguaya, in alliance with Moises Bertoni, owner of the centre. It offers the last three years of high school and students graduate with a technical degree in environmental sciences. The girls pay a symbolic amount to cover the cost of their education and help at the tourism lodge and with the sale of products from the farming center run by the school.

Centro Educacional Agrourbano

The school is situated close to Brasilia and hosts 520 students and staff. It is on its way to becoming resource independent and emission free, in terms of waste, water and energy. The school is in an agricultural region that has suffered environmental deterioration because of pesticides and pollution and is currently experiencing the worst drought in 80 years. Built right next to a natural reserve and local farms, the school wants to help the community transition to more sustainable technologies.

Prof. Dimas Mozart e Silva School

The Prof. Dimas Mozart e Silva School is a public, secondary education institution. The school is located in Taquarituba, Brazil, a small city with 20,000 inhabitants employed primarily in the agricultural and ceramics industries. The school proposes the implementation of a comprehensive sustainability program. This program includes the installation of a 17.8kW rooftop solar photovoltaic system, rainwater harvesting, waste recycling through composters, expanding an organic garden, replacing conventional lighting by LEDs, installing lighting sensors, using economic toilet flushing and constructing a 55 square-meter “sustainability” room with a green roof.

Oceania

Tenison Woods College

Tenison Woods College is a co-educational Roman Catholic school in Mount Gambier, South Australia that offers education to almost 1,500 pupils ranging from pre-school through to year 12 (final year) students.

The stated aim of the project is to maximize the learning outcomes for students from across the region, while significantly reducing the school’s power costs.

Lowanna College

Lowanna College is the largest secondary school in the Latrobe Valley, Victoria. The 975 boys and girls attending the school are drawn from rural townships, where most parents work in local coal-fired power stations or in agriculture.

The recent closure of one of three large power stations nearby saw the loss of 800 jobs, which placed considerable pressure on the community. The school is therefore at the heart of the transition from fossil fuels to cleaner sources of power.

Motufoua Secondary School

Motufoua Secondary School (MSS) is the only government school in Tuvalu, a small Polynesian island nation in the Pacific Ocean. It is located on the island of Vaitapu (population 1,555), which at 5.6 square km is the nation’s largest atoll. The school has a 46kW solar PV array and a diesel generator but, as this is subject to fuel availability, a constant power supply is not guaranteed.

The candidate proposes installing a bio-digester and piggery. This will provide organic fertilizer for the vegetable garden and produce enough biogas to meet the school’s needs, thus saving money otherwise spent on synthetic fertilizer and liquid petroleum gas (LPG) imports from Fiji. It will also install four 10,000-liter rainwater tanks and a 3kW solar PV system to light the piggery and run a water pump.

Europe

Vladimir Nazor school

Vladimir Nazor school is located in a village 15km from the Adriatic coast. The project seeks to take advantage of the sunny location by installing a solar system to provide both electricity and water heating. This is the school’s first application to the Zayed Future Energy Prize.

The evaluation of this candidate should take into account the local context and the school’s circumstances. Škabrnja was the site of a civilian massacre in November 2001 by Serbian paramilitary and Yugoslav army troops. A mass grave containing the remains of 84 people was found adjacent to the school, which was destroyed and not rebuilt until 1997. The current principal, Marin Pavičić, who was a child at the time, escaped by hiding in his family’s basement. The school’s namesake Vladimir Nazor was a Croatian poet and politician who died in 1949. He was the first speaker of the Croatian parliament.

Werner Heisenberg Schule Ruesselsheim

Werner Heisenberg School is a vocational school, located in Rüsselsheim, Germany with approximately 2,900 students and a teaching staff of around 150. It offers training in metal technology, trade and logistics, security and fire services, and other subjects, as well as German language courses for refugees.

This project aims to expand the vocational school’s existing electric vehicle charging station. The current charging station is fed by wind and solar generation totaling about 15,000kWh annually and includes a student-installed double-pivot PV tracking system. The applicant estimates that, with its clean energy and charging installed facilities to date, it has avoided the use of about 100,000kWh of grid power and the emission of about 60,000kg of CO2. Surplus self-generated power is now delivered to the local grid.

Gomel State Regional Lyceum

Gomel State Regional Lyceum opened 20 years ago in the city of Gomel, the second-most populous city in land-locked Belarus.

Over 400 children attend the school which includes academic buildings, dormitories and a “museum of energy savings”. The region was severely affected by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986, therefore the school has a special interest in renewable energy and energy efficiency measures, according to its application. The candidate states that the museum is often visited by foreign delegations, including the one from the World Bank of Reconstruction and Development.